Sports has many benefits on the mind and body of those who practise it. It also enables the person to adopt a healthy outlook towards life.
In recent years, sports has been also seen as a vehicle for inclusivity of disadvantaged groups, including women. Sports is increasingly seen as a vehicle to assist women to become stronger and more resilient. UN Women clearly states that: “By teaching women and girls teamwork, self-reliance, resilience and confidence, sport is one of the great drivers of gender equality. Women in sport defy gender stereotypes and social norms, make inspiring role models, and show men and women as equals” (Women in Sports).
The project SCORE (Social Inclusion of Refugee Women through Sports) looks at another dimension of inclusivity of women in sports. SCORE is a European project funded under the ERASMUS+ programme. It is led by ORGANOS GI from Greece and has as its project partners Eleven Campaign (UK), CESIE (Italy), FOPSIM (Malta) and Girl Power Organisation (Denmark).
SCORE aims to enhance sport trainers and coaches' skills and competencies for managing diversity and tensions and to carry out inclusion process of disadvantaged and marginalised population such as refugee women.
Furthermore, the coaches will encourage refugee women to involve themselves in sport activities through the organization of intercultural sport meetings.
SCORE identifies good practices of women refugees’ participation in local grass-root sport activities, provides related education and training to sport coaches and embraces the participation of refugee women in sport activities together with other female participants from the local community. Through this project, the project partners will enable women who due to their background may find it difficult to interact with persons from other nationalities. SCORE aims to provide an environment where through sports activities, participants can share a sense of belonging.
Through this project, refugee women will have the opportunity to get in touch with local and international female sports personalities and get involved in sport activities. The project also focuses on enhancing basic soft skills of refugee women, which are traditionally associated with sport – such as teamwork, communication, time management, problem solving, leadership, commitment and motivation, as during the intercultural meetings the sport coaches will use non formal methods for enhancing the above skills. These will be presented through a training course that is currently being designed by the project partners. The training course is envisaged to take place during the first quarter of 2021.
The project SCORE is a continuation of work that FOPSIM has done in the past year on the theme of inclusion through sports. Through this project we aim to reach a minimum of 10 sports professionals (coaches and sports specialists) as well as 15 local and refugee women into sports.
If you are a sports professional and would like to know more about this project, or if you are a female migrant or refugee interested in sports and would like to know more about our project, or would like to take part in our training programme, we invite to contact Iñaki Oyon on inaki.o.barrio@fopsim.com.
